Disaster preparation

bt848x is still under developing. We don't hope it, but someday you may (or may not) meet the system panic. The readiness is all; we introduce typical recovery method here.

Before driver installation

  1. If possible, and as possible as you can, enable UFS logging. For detail, see mount_ufs(1M) manual pages. Unless you use RAID or similar, you only have to add 'logging' keyword into /etc/vfstab.
  2. Prepare Solaris Install CD (Software CD 1 of 2) and CD-ROM drive.
  3. Make backup copies of name_to_major, path_to_inst, driver_classes, driver_aliases, devlink.tab in /etc directory to other place. It is desirable that copies are saved in root partition. Of course, other important files should be backed up too.
  4. Confirm which device is mounted as root partition by issuing 'mount' command. In following example, we assume it to be /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.
  5. Shutdown machine.
  6. OpenBoot PROM monitor prompts you, type 'boot cdrom -s'.
  7. Confirm that shell prompt '#' appears after some wait.
  8. Issue command "mkdir /tmp/foo; mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/foo", and confirm usual filesystem appears under /tmp/foo.
At this point, you can run emergency shell even if Solaris won't boot from HDD.

Recovery from system crash

  1. Run emergency shell after booting from CD-ROM. And issue "mkdir /tmp/foo; mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/foo"
  2. Original /etc becomes /tmp/foo/etc now. Restore saved files into here. Remove /tmp/foo/etc/rem_name_to_major if exists.
  3. chdir to /tmp/foo/platform/sun4u/kernel/drv/, and remove files 'bt848x', 'sparcv9/bt848x', 'bt848x.conf'.
  4. Issue "sync;sync;sync;halt". You will return to PROM monitor.
  5. Issue "boot -sr" to reboot.
Notice: Above instruction doesn't assure 100% success of recovery!

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